Showing all posts about writing
Sydney Writers Festival program 2022
26 March 2022
The program for the 2022 Sydney Writers’ Festival was unveiled on Thursday, and refreshingly for the lockdown-fatigued is choke full of face-to-face, in person events. Spread across venues including Sydney Town Hall, City Recital Hall, and Carriageworks, the festival opens on Monday 16 May, and concludes on Sunday 22 May 2022.
In addition, numerous other “neighbourhood” events, will be held in other areas, both in and out of Sydney, hosted at places including the State Library of NSW, WestWords Parramatta, Ashfield Town Hall, Chatswood Library on The Concourse, Penrith City Library, and Wollongong Art Gallery. Top up your Opal card, you could be covering a bit of ground.
The opening night address takes place at Sydney Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday 17 May, and features Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins, and Nardi Simpson.
Nearly four hundred Australian and international authors and writers, along with actors, sports people, academics, and many others, are scheduled to participate in proceedings, including Emily Bitto, winner of the 2015 Stella Prize, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Mick Elliott, former Australian footballer Adam Goodes, Muireann Irish, Bri Lee, Charlotte McConaghy, J.P. Pomare, Teela Reid, Yumi Stynes, and Murong Xuecun, also known as Hao Qun.
The theme of this year’s festival, explains artistic director Michael Williams is change my mind. How perfectly apt, because what is writing, if not transformative?
Change my mind with a stanza or a couplet, a jarring dissonance, a beautiful echo or a rhyme. Change it with a flight of fancy, an intricate, imagined world, a compelling character I’ll never meet but never forget. Turn it upside down with searing rhetoric, impeccable research, the knock-out argument that has me questioning everything I know and all that I believe.
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The Tolkien Estate, a repository of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work
23 March 2022
The Tolkien Estate looks to be the ultimate resource of the work and life of British author, poet, and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, writer of The Lord of the Rings, and other works. It’s incredible to think — given the depth and scope of his writing output — that Tolkien worked mainly as a teacher at Oxford University, instead of a full time author.
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J. R. R. Tolkien, literature, writing
Virtual Literary Speed Dating 2022
21 March 2022
The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) is hosting several virtual literary speed dating events this year for its members. Prospective authors will be given three minutes to pitch their completed manuscript to local literary agents and publishers, at online events in May, and then again a few months later.
Canberra based Australian author Shelley Burr is a literary speed dating success story, having found a publisher for her debut novel Wake, at an event in December 2020. Here’s speed dating that’s worth participating in.
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2022 Australian Book Design Awards longlist
18 March 2022
Especially for those who enjoy judging books by their covers, the 2022 Australian Book Design Awards longlist has been announced. There are over one hundred and sixty titles vying for recognition across twenty categories, plus the Deb Brash Emerging Designer of the Year award.
Fiction titles are essentially separated into four groups, children’s, young adult, commercial, and literary. The Other Side of Beautiful, by South Australian author Kim Lock, The Younger Wife, by Melbourne novelist Sally Hepworth, are among candidates in the commercial fiction category, while In Moonland, by Miles Allinson, is one of the nominations in the literary fiction segment.
Over four-hundred-and-ninety titles were considered in this year’s award, before the longlist was unveiled. The shortlist will be made public in early April, with the winners in each category being named on Friday 3 June 2022, in Melbourne.
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Michael Williams steps down as Sydney Writers’ Festival artistic director
18 March 2022
After two years as artistic director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Michael Williams has decided to step down. Williams who is Melbourne based, and has a young family residing there, always saw his tenure in the role as temporary, something occasioned by COVID, and the challenges the pandemic posed to events such as the festival.
“I was brought on, to quote The Godfather, as a wartime consigliere, to see the festival through the COVID period, and it was only ever a kind of interim posting. It was going to be the one year. Then, quite apart from anything else, last year’s was so much fun, it was such a wonderful job and wonderful organisation that I couldn’t resist doing a matched pair.”
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Twitter novels, written in 140 character tweets
17 March 2022
Here’s a blast from the past, from back in the days when tweets were limited to 140 characters: “novels” restricted to said limit, written by best-selling authors including Jilly Cooper, Ian Rankin, Jeffrey Archer, and Anne Enright, in October 2012.
If there were an award for the best Twitter fiction “novel”, and I were the judge, I’d name British novelist Helen Fielding, she who gave the world Bridget Jones’s Diary in 1999, the winner:
OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don’t use our children’s names as password.
This may, or may not be, Fielding’s Twitter page.
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Helen Fielding, novels, writing
The 2022 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
16 March 2022
Entries are open in the 2022 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Works of fiction, written in English, consisting of two thousand to five thousand words, are eligible, with a prize money pool totalling A$12,000 on offer. Entries close on Monday 2 May 2022. While an Australian based prize, submissions will be accepted from anyone regardless of their location.
Established in 2010, the prize was renamed the following year in honour of late British born Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. Although she had been writing for decades, Jolley’s first book was not published until she was fifty-three. She also taught writing at what is now Curtin University, in Perth, Western Australia, and renowned Australian author Tim Winton was among her students.
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Elizabeth Jolley, literature, writing
2022 International Booker Prize longlist
11 March 2022
Thirteen titles have been named on the 2022 International Booker Prize longlist. Awarded in its present format since 2016, the International Booker celebrates works translated into English, with the £50,000 prize split equally between the author and translator.
Among the titles translated from eleven languages into English, is Tomb of Sand, by New Delhi based Indian author Geetanjali Shree, and translated by American writer and painter Daisy Rockwell. Shree’s work is the first book written in Hindi to be included on the International Booker Prize longlist.
Just about all of these titles are new to me — the books I read, when time permits, tend to be contemporary Australian, but not always — so it’s good to see something new and not so familiar, that I can add to my to-be-read list.
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Booker Prize, literature, writing
Again, Rachel, Marian Keyes
28 February 2022
Readers of Irish author Marian Keyes‘ Walsh Family Series of novels first made the acquaintance of Rachel Walsh in 1997, in Rachel’s Holiday. Rachel was twenty-seven, and not in a good place. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend, Luke, and had been placed in rehabilitation by her family on account of her substance abuse.
Fast forward to 2021, and Rachel’s world is a better place. In fact, she has come full circle. She now works as a councillor at the facility she was admitted to twenty-five years earlier. Further, she’s in a happy relationship, and is getting along nicely with her mother and siblings. All up, everything seems to be going exceedingly well for Rachel. But her reverie is shattered by an out of the blue call from an old flame, in Again, Rachel (published by Penguin Books Australia, February 2022).
Just when she thought she had everything sorted out, and was settled, Rachel finds her life turned on its head. What is she to do? Follow her heart, and her ex, and venture back into a time and place she thought she’d left behind? Or remain in the predictable now? How fragile, it seems, is the life we believed to be firmly established…
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fiction, Marian Keyes, TBR list, writing
The rules of writing for writers by writers
23 February 2022
Ten rules for writing, put together by The Guardian, part one and part two, with insights from writers including Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Moorcock, Zadie Smith, Michael Morpurgo, Sarah Waters, and Will Self.
There’s a lot of good stuff here, such as this idea from Hilary Mantel:
Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.
Particularly relevant for someone like me who writes at a glacial pace. And then this nugget from British poet Andrew Motion:
Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
Thank you. I’ll go for later in the day. This coming from someone not of the school of thought you must wake at 4AM to achieve anything.
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